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Extend Gtalk With a Couple Handy Add-ons

Written by Josh on Friday, August 22nd, 2008

Google’s culture and 20% time has become pretty famous across Silicon valley. It refers to the time engineers are allowed, expected even, to work on whatever it is they wish.

Sometimes these projects are launched through Google Labs and tested. Popular products are then released as part of the Google product lineup.

It’s an extensive list to be sure.

Gtalk was released back in 2005 primarily to bring the chat functionality of Gmail to the desktop, but evolving along the way into a notifications service for various other Google products such as Orkut and Calendar. The labs edition is here.

Personally, I find Gtalk a little dull, also a lot of my contacts are on the Windows Live network so I prefer to use Digsby (or Pidgin).

If you do use Gtalk, then Mashable’s Palin Ningthoujam discovered a couple handy addons to give you some extra customisation, options and functions:

Extended Talk

Extended Talk is an add-on for Google Talk. It has over 15 different features including file transfer, custom images, active status, slash commands, smileys, and desktop friends. Extended Talk is the first add-on to add file transfer and is currently the only add-on to do so.

I have no idea how well this works, if it works, in the new beta labs version of GTalk.

Google Talk Shell

Gtalk Shell is a free addon for Google talk. It has following features make your avatars as a slide (dynamic avatars), anti boss hotkey (Hide/show gtalk window with a hotkey), configure to auto hide gtalk main window when it on the edge of desktop this will give you large work area, configure google talk always on top of desktop, and launch Google talk with nomutex mode (can run several instance simultaneously).